"I'm writing to inform you that the release team discussed Drop or Fix Fallback Mode yesterday. We've come to the conclusion that we can't maintain fallback mode in reasonable quality, and are better off dropping it." Gnome-fallback has been my refuge, as I find both Unity and Gnome 3's shell unusable. Yes, we have been warned this would happen. I thought the cost of maintaining gnome-panel would be so low that it might never need to happen. But as it appears, it is deemed necessary. As for me, I'm bound for something Qt, as I am very angry at Gnome for abandoning its 'classic' users.

GNOME will face its final battle when Red Hat sees significant changes in their marketshare when they deploy RHEL 7 with GNOME Shell. It's not that RHEL depends on GNOME Shell to survive or remain strong on sales; but there will be a great deal of Red Hat consumers that won't just upgrade to their latest product.

There are many companies who make full use of GNOME 2 user interface through Red Hat current product and changing that paradigm with GNOME 3 would mean a huge distress and added up costs. Since Red Hat is left as the only strong supporter for GNOME, you better believe the changes happening right now on the desktop realm will affect market share. In fact we can see a huge mess going on with the Fedora project.

Since the introduction of Unity, Ubuntu is facing a huge decline. MATE, Trinity, Cinnamon and other fork projects are not convincing the community. XFCE will always be awkward. KDE ensures the desktop customization is to the point the users bleed dealing with so much overkill bars, options and what have you.

Windows 7 not only surpassed XP but also made up for the Vista fiasco, right on time when Ubuntu was coming along as a strong alternative back in 2009. Linux fanboys used to say in 1999 that Linux would be the number 2 desktop operating system by 2003. We are 9 years past 2003 and that never happened. Though Linux is fun, we're in a middle of huge crisis right now and it will take good sensible developers to fix this huge mess.

I've seen already a replicate of your post, about those statistics. They don't measure up the consequences of Unity yet. There is a lot of people still running old versions - to be perfectly clear, the right statistics should reveal a close look at the versions of Ubuntu being used. Unity based Ubuntu will be the smallest slice.

That is why this trend is obviously wrong to just say that "Ubuntu" as in Unity form, is taking over.